Lesson 1
Lesson Plan Download pdf
Starter (15 minutes)
Ask the children if any of them know how to count to 10 in a foreign language? Have them demonstrate. Does anyone know how to count to 10 in Japanese? (possible if some do martial arts).
Using the number presentation to accompany you, count to 10 and have the children repeat, doing actions where appropriate (for number one for example, you could pretend you’re itchy (ichi) and scratch yourself. For number two (ni), you could point to your knee and so on).
Can you do the gesture and the children respond with the corresponding number in Japanese/ English?
Have children demonstrate. Can they count from 1-10 without using the props? If you show numeral flash cards, can pupils give the appropriate Japanese response?
Numbers:| ichi | 1 | いち |
| ni | 2 | に |
| san | 3 | さん |
| yon | 4 | よん |
| go | 5 | ご |
| roku | 6 | ろく |
| nana | 7 | なな |
| hachi | 8 | はち |
| kyu | 9 | きゅう |
| ju | 10 | じゅう |
For the purpose of this course, all letters in bold represent a long vowel sound. In actual fact, this long vowel sound is two syllables in Japanese. If you listen carefully to a Japanese person, you can clearly hear the two syllables being pronounced. Furthermore, despite the long vowel sound, the word is still pronounced evenly, with equal stress being placed on each part of the word. Sounds are generally not ‘swallowed’ as can be the case in English (the exception to this being ‘su’ as in ‘desu/ gozaimasu’ – see notes in the next section).
